


A Catalyst in Our Lungs (The Decay of a Dynasty)

by dreamtowns



Series: Weaponized Hope [5]
Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternative Universe - Assassins, Alternative Universe - Canon Divergence, Budding relationships, Family Feels, Fluff, Found Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, LGBTQ Themes, Mild Angst, Mild Language, Recovery, established relationships - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 22:42:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16819900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamtowns/pseuds/dreamtowns
Summary: Unit Miracle had always been on the verge of breaking, splintering out like a flickering light bulb, choking on the air Teikō Academy seeped. After the Fall, they (begrudgingly) went their separate ways, but the change had been jarring. Where they once slept in the same vicinity for years, they were now separated. But their new teams and schools make the distance, the ache, bearable. Slowly, they learn what it means to live outside of Teikou’s shadow.They learn how to heal.





	A Catalyst in Our Lungs (The Decay of a Dynasty)

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own Kuroko no Basuke | The Basketball Which Kuroko Plays. It belongs to its’ mangaka, Fujimaki Tadatoshi. This is for entertainment purposes only. No money is being made off of this work. 
> 
> Enjoy!

**part i.**  
**satsuki**

When Momoi meets Sakurai Ryou, the boy turns shock-white at the sight of Aomine’s mutinous scowl. Then, once he notes that the scowl is Aomine’s default expression, he relaxes minutely and has an expression torn between anxiety and curiosity. Momoi notes that Sakurai, besides her, is the smallest member of the household. The adults in the room ignore his reaction, more focused on Momoi and Aomine settling in. Distantly, as Imayoshi Maiko, her newest guardian, starts talking to her about clothes shopping, Momoi thinks that Sakurai’s reaction is probably the norm for this household.

Before they’d arrived at the house, Maiko had told them of her son. _“He’s got an anxiety problem, so he probably won’t bother you once you’ve settled in,”_ the woman explained in that quiet voice of hers; it sounded, to Momoi, a little bit like the soft way rain would hit the window of her dorm. _“His names’ Ryou, though I call him Ryou-chan. He’ll be, like, your brother.”_

Momoi’s never had a brother before, and she isn’t sure if she wants one. All she’s had is Unit Miracle and, before, she’s had Aomine. She’s _always_ had Aomine, and not even the Academy could rip that away from her.

“Ah, Ryou-chan,” Maiko speaks to her son, and Sakurai’s eyes train on her even before she finishes saying his name. _Curious,_ Momoi thinks. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to share your bedroom with Daiki-kun, okay?”

“Th-that’s f-fine,” says Sakurai, his voice softer than Maiko’s.

“Wonderful, I’ll give you both a grand tour,” says Imayoshi Shigeru, Maiko’s husband; he’s a cheerful man around Murasakibara’s height, but his aura makes Momoi feel calm and protected. Only few people can give her that feeling, a number she can only count on one hand. He motions for Momoi and Aomine to follow him, and they do.

The house is simple. It’s large, but slightly cramped in that ‘lived-in’ way. Traditional architecture seeps from the paper walls as Shigeru guides them through the hallways. Only four bedrooms: the master bedroom, Momoi’s room, Aomine’s and Sakurai’s room, and the room that belongs to Imayoshi Shouichi, an older teen whom Momoi has yet to meet. He wanted to be there, but he had an important practice meeting he couldn’t afford to miss as he was the captain.

“Well,” Shigeru says at the end of their tour, that patient and gentle smile on his face. “This is it. I hope you can find yourselves at home here.”

 _This is not home,_ Momoi wants to say. What comes out of her mouth, however, is this: “Thank you, Shigeru-san.”

“No problem, kiddo,” the man responds. He looks like he wants to reach out and pat her head, but with the way Aomine crouches over her, eyes wary and steely, protective in the face of strangers who may or may not have interior motives, makes him think otherwise. “We try to have dinner together every night, but our schedules are pretty hectic now, so we have family dinner Friday nights’, okay?”

“Okay,” Momoi says, a light smile on her lips.

Her Unit did something similar, back in the Academy. It happened over the weekend, though, because they were required to eat in the dining halls on weekdays. Because they had kitchens in their dorms, they chose to cook on Saturday and Sunday. Her stomach twinges at the memories drifting in her mind but shoves them away. She needed to focus; ground herself in reality unless she breaks.

After the tour, they’re left to their devices until dinner. Aomine ignores his own bedroom and plops down on Momoi’s bed. She stares at the pretty blue duvet and sheets, and wonders, absentmindedly, how the Imayoshi’s knew her favorite color.

“They seem nice,” she says.

Aomine grunts.

Momoi rolls her eyes but she finds herself wondering how long it will take for their “niceness” to run out. Their old Captains were nice in the beginning, too.

By the time dinner rolls around, Momoi only has one box left of her stuff from her dorm. She shoves that in the back of her closet. There are things in there she refused to be reminded of. Aomine’s phone buzzes incessantly, in the way that she knows it’s Kise texting, and nearly rolls her eyes. Boys. So oblivious.

Sakurai knocks, timid and soft, on her door. “U-Um. Dinner.”

“Alright,” she says through the door. “We’ll be down in a minute.”

*

Momoi decides, only three days later, that she wouldn’t mind having Sakurai as a little brother. “I guess he’s alright,” Aomine said, when Momoi asked for his opinion on their adopted sibling, and that’s high praise, coming from one of the main enforcers of their Unit; from someone who declared he despised those untouched by the Academy. “He says sorry a lot, though.”

“He does,” Momoi agrees and adds, a little fond, “I think it’d be weird if he didn’t.”

Aomine hums.

Three days into their stay at the Imayoshi’s, and Momoi’s already picked apart the dynamics of the household. Maiko and Shigeru run their household in a kind and warm manner, but they aren’t pushovers. Shouichi isn’t around often, due to cram school and extracurriculars, but he isn’t cold towards them or Sakurai. He welcomes them in his odd, cryptic way. Sakurai is like a skittish ghost in the peripheral of her eye, a pulsing presence that always watches but never contributes.

Aomine’s groan jolts her out of her thoughts. “I know that look,” he says, almost accusingly, and Momoi does her best to look innocent. “You got that look that says you have some puzzle to deconstruct or something.”

Momoi purses her lips. “I just think Sakurai-kun is – interesting.”

“Leave me out of it,” Aomine tells her in a curt tone.

Momoi smiles.

Her phone buzzes with a message from Akashi; a group text pondering of their wellbeing and current guardians. _We’re ok on our end,_ Momoi sends back, knowing that Aomine probably won’t respond so she does it in his place. _Maiko-san and Shigeru-san are alright!_

Although Aomine has his own bedroom, he sleeps on Momoi’s floor. No matter how kindhearted their current guardians are, they are still in enemy territory. Aomine sleeps propped up by the door, a weapon hidden underneath the pajamas Shouichi gave him. If they’re aware of their sleeping arrangements, Maiko and Shigeru speak nothing of it. Momoi ignores the look on their expressions when they stare at the new teens in their care.

“I want to cook something,” Momoi says suddenly.

Aomine chokes on the candy in his mouth and props himself up on his elbows. “No,” he almost barks out. “You’re not going anywhere _near_ a stove, Satsuki! You’ll poison everyone!”

Momoi pouts. “I’m not that bad, Dai-chan!”

“No, you’re worse!”

Momoi attempts to smother him with one of her throw pillows but stops halfway through the process at the timid knock on her door. Ignoring Aomine’s choked breaths, Momoi calls, “You can come in, Sakurai-kun!”

A second later, Sakurai’s head pops into the room. His eyes widen at the sight they make, but he manages to ask, “U-um…is, is everything ok? I’m – I’m sorry if I’m interrupting anything!”

“You aren’t,” Momoi responds cheerfully, as if she isn’t currently smothering Aomine, and then tilts her head. “You can come inside, Sakurai-kun. There’s no need to hover by the door!”

“S-Sorry,” Sakurai apologizes, but he edges into the room regardless.

Momoi removes the pillow and smiles, triumphant, at Aomine’s wheezing. “That’s what you get, Dai-chan!”

Aomine pinches her, and she squawks, raising her throw pillow above her head in a threatening manner. Aomine raises his own as well, but before they can dissolve into an impromptu pillow fight, there’s a quiet laugh near the door. Sakurai watches them, hand over his mouth, amusement glittering in his eyes.

“So, Sakurai-kun,” Momoi says, putting the pillow down on her lap in a prim manner as if she weren’t just using it as a weapon, “Are you excited to begin school at Touou?”

It was a surprise, to note that they were all attending Touou High. From her research on the Imayoshi’s, Shigeru was the vice principal. Maiko, on the other hand, was a data analyst for the SDF.

“I, um, I guess so?” Sakurai responds, though it sounds more like a question, and twists his fingers in a nervous manner. He doesn’t look them in the eye, content to stare down at his socked feet, but Momoi understands that Sakurai doesn’t look anyone in the eye.

“I think it’ll be fun,” says Momoi, if only to try and prompt further conversation. She really did want to get to know her foster brother better, and, although he’d say otherwise, Aomine was curious about him as well. “Right, Dai-chan?”

“I guess,” Aomine mutters. “School’s school. ‘S long as it’s not the Academy, I don’t care.”

Momoi rolls her eyes but, well, she can’t really argue.

*

She decides that she really, really doesn’t like Touou High as much as she thought she would. The uniform skirt is a little too short for her liking, and it’s skin-tight in a way that makes strangers (and classmates) stare at her longer than she’s comfortable with. Her discomfort at that is immediately noticeable to Aomine, who is even more in tuned with her emotions and well-being now that they’re still in enemy territory (quietly, Momoi thinks that the Imayoshi’s might _always_ be enemy territory), and thus Momoi spends her first couple of weeks in high school with Aomine hovering over her like an overprotective brother.

All it does is make her miss the other Miracles even more.

“I want to go see Tetsu-kun,” she tells Aomine during their lunch break. They’ve claimed the rooftop of the freshman building as theirs (and, by extension, Sakurai’s), and no one bothers them, thankfully. When Aomine doesn’t answer, too enthused with his magazine, Momoi pokes his thigh with her chopsticks, and he sputters in protest.

“What the hell, Satsuki?”

Sakurai eyes their exchange nervously.

“I _said_ that I want to go see Tetsu-kun!”

“Then, go see him!”

She pouts for a minute, but fixes her expression into something more somber and serious when she asks, “You don’t want to go see him?”

Aomine’s mouth twists. “You and I both know Tetsu doesn’t want to see me, Satsuki.”

Momoi sighs and leaves the conversation at that. There are wounds within her Unit that she can’t mend with her will alone (though, god, how she wishes she could), wounds that she might’ve caused with her naïve desire to have them all stay together, wounds that she knows absolutely nothing about.

This is one of those wounds, and it sort of feels like she’s stepping on a minefield.

She swallows one of the cute octopus sausages Maiko made for their bento (at least, Momoi _thinks_ it was Maiko), and turns to ask Sakurai about how he was settling in so far.

Sakurai sputters for a moment, stumbling over his words, but Momoi is used to that reaction and waits until he gathers a coherent enough sentence to say, “Good. Um. Um. I might try, try out for, um, b-basketball.”

That grasps Aomine’s attention, and he sits upright. “You play?”

Sakurai nods.

*

When she goes to see Kuroko, the breath she didn’t know she held was released. He was doing fine, settling in well with his new team ( _they still won’t win against Touou,_ she thinks as she eyes their physiques, _not with those numbers_ ).

Then, Momoi captures eyes with one of the smaller first-years and, although she smiles, her eyes glisten with tears.

There are a lot of things Momoi has not told her Unit. Things about herself, but, mostly, things about the Academy itself. As she was the designated hacker of her Unit, her power with technokinesis notwithstanding, sometimes Momoi liked to see how far she could get into the Academy’s system without getting caught. It was a challenge. It was a risk.

In the end, all it did was make Momoi really, really sad.

“Are, are you okay, Momoi-san?” Sakurai asks her when she returns home. He’s elbow-deep in dough, and Momoi’s intrigued at the mess in the kitchen. At her quirked eyebrow, he explains, “Oh, I’m, um, m-making cookies.”

“Can I help?” she asks.

“S-Sure,” he replies and then breaks off half of the dough. “I’m, um, kneading the – the dough.”

She washes her hands (germs are gross), and, after carefully watching Sakurai, copies his movements. A few minutes into the exercise, she remembers his question.

“I’m okay,” she says, quietly, smiling a little, “I just happened to see an old friend.”

If Sakurai notices that her smile is sad, he says nothing.

Momoi kind of loves him for that.

“You know,” Momoi starts when Sakurai guides her through shaping the dough into smaller balls to put on the cookie sheet. “I had a little brother, once.”

Sakurai quirks an eyebrow. “You did?”

“Uh huh,” she nods and places three more balls onto the cookie sheet, exactly twelve inches apart. “He isn’t, um, here anymore.”

Sakurai’s reply is quiet. “I see.”

“It’s alright, though.” She’s made peace with Kisumi’s death. “I don’t know how I’d feel if…well…this probably sounds horrible to say, but, if he was still alive now.”

“I get it,” Sakurai says, and gives her a smile. “If I had siblings, I – I wouldn’t want them to…to be with the Academy either.”

“Yeah,” Momoi murmurs.

They finish the cookies in comfortable silence.

That night, she dreams of a memory and a boy she had long thought dead. _Are you sure you want to do this?_

Their voices are muted, as if underwater, and they are mere blobs of color to her eyes. They are in the Academy (where else would they go?), curled together in a rec room as they watch a bunch of ten-year-old’s attempt to play air hockey. Their cheer is muted, almost hollow.

(Momoi knows that they do not make it to see the Fall.)

_Yes._

_This will change everything, you know._

_I know,_ and the memory looks at her, eyes steely and grave and so, so empty. _So, here’s what we’re going to do._

*

Momoi wakes to the taste of ash in her mouth. She steps over Aomine’s legs and, when he jolts himself awake at the crack of her door, whispers, “I’m going to use the bathroom,” and watches him fall back into sleep.

She throws up twice.

*

“We gotta do some more PR,” says Kise, in leu of greeting.

Momoi blinks over her magazine. She doesn’t wonder how Kise got into her house (or, rather, _found_ it). Next to her, Sakurai squeaks out a greeting.

“Oho?” says Kise. “Who’s the cutie?”

“Don’t tease him,” Momoi scolds, throwing a concerned look at the shade of red Sakurai now sports. “Anyway, Ki-chan, this is my little brother, Sakurai Ryou. Now, what’re you talking about?”

“The Miracles have to do some, like, interviews, I’m thinking,” Kise is saying, pacing along her carpet, half-muttering into his palm. Used to the sight (though, it was normally due to a mission), Momoi waits for him to gather his thoughts. “Ah! We need to strengthen our positive image to the public in the aftermath of Teikou. People want to see how we’re doing, if we’re healing, blah, blah, blah. Whether we like it or not, we’re public figures now.”

“You’ve always been a public figure, Ki-chan,” she points out.

He waves absentmindedly. “Only to a small following. Now, though, _all_ of us are public. Far more than I or, even, Akashicchi, ever was.”

He begins to pace again, though this time Momoi barely makes sense of his mutters.

“Maybe you should sit down,” she tells him, patting an empty spot on her bed. “I think we should all meet up over the weekend, when none of us have school?”

 _This sounds like something all of us should discuss, in person,_ she thinks, and Kise brightens.

“That’s a great idea, Momoicchi,” Kise exclaims, and Sakurai makes a soft noise and jumps. Absentmindedly, Momoi pats his hand. “But, also, I don’t want, um, anyone to be uncomfortable, you know? I know Aominecchi and Murasakibaracchi will say no. Midorimacchi too, probably.”

“Akashi-kun won’t,” Momoi says after a moment of thought. “And the interviewers might forget about Tetsu-kun.”

Kise nods. “Just us three, then?”

“The faces of Unit Miracle,” Momoi adds with a smile.

“I’ll text Akashicchi about a meeting,” Kise tells her with a bright grin, immediately tapping on his phone.

After a moment of quiet, Sakurai slips out of the room. Momoi almost doesn’t notice his departure until the door clicks when it closes, and she’s a little jarred at what that means. Kise’s tense shoulders droop, however, the second Sakurai leaves. Momoi puzzles over that tidbit.

“He’s sweet,” says Kise, and Momoi nods.

She doesn’t, however, comment on Kise’s expression. She might not be a telepath, but even she knows that there are some things, some thoughts, meant to be secret.

(Momoi stills wonders, though, on what in Sakurai’s mind made Kise look so – _sad_ , as if someone carved his heart right out of his chest).

Along with the interviews they manage to do, all respectable sources thanks to Yamaguchi Atsuko, they’re thrown into the basketball season. Touou High knows they are something short of invincible with Aomine on their team, and Momoi strategizing on the sidelines. It’s fun, Momoi ends up thinking. It’s probably the most fun she’s had in a while.

(it still hurts, though, when they lose both the Inter-High and the Winter Cup, but Momoi holds her head up high in the face of the victors.

 _Next time_ , she thinks, studying the tear-stained faces of her teammates, of _Aomine’s_. _Next time will be different._ )

It takes a while, but Momoi’s still taken aback when she realizes that Aomine no longer sleeps by her door, when the knives under her pillow decreases to a singular one, when she notices that when she says, “let’s go home, Dai-chan,” she means _home,_ not just the Imayoshi’s house.

She doesn’t mind it, though.

It’s been too long since Momoi has not had a home.

There are three imperative things about herself that Momoi has never told anyone in her Unit. She’s barely confronted them herself, too terrified of its’ implications. She’s content to tuck them away in the darkest parts of her until she’s ready, until she’s safe enough, to bring them out into the open. One of them she’s told someone before, but Momoi doesn’t think it counts because, in the end, they were gone.

(Momoi has many corpses in her closet).

Sometimes, when she knows she won’t be missed, Momoi lights candles in her room and goes over old pictures of festivals and school events, all the moments and memories of Teikou pursuing the façade of a normal educational facility.

During one of these days, Sakurai ends up sitting next to her. Momoi doesn’t even notice until Sakurai touches her wrist, gently like almost everything he does, and asks, “Wanna talk about them?”

She does, the stories spilling off her tongue like a running faucet. Sakurai listens patiently, laughing along with her, and presses napkins into her hands when her words sputter into sobs. “I miss them,” she ends up weeping against his shoulder. “I miss them so much.”

Momoi misses them so much, it feels like splintered glass when she breathes.

Sakurai says nothing, but he does rub her arm.

“Sakurai-kun,” she ends up muttering, “why did they hurt us like that? We were just kids, Sakurai-kun. _We were all kids.”_

“I don’t know, Momoi-san,” Sakurai murmurs. There’s a weight to his voice that Momoi doesn’t really understand, doesn’t want to. “I really don’t know.”

*

Sometimes, Momoi wonders where she would be if she had said _no_ , when he had asked, _can you help me with something?_

Sometimes, Momoi wonders if she hates him for it, or loves him even fiercer.

*

Not even a day passes, and Momoi decides it’s time. _There’s something I have to tell all of you,_ she texts in their group chat that morning, her hair still pinned up in her towel. _Can we try and meet up today?_ The remnants of steam from her shower curl around her shoulders. Once she’s gotten okay’s from them all, she finds a comfortable outfit of jeans and an oversized sweater that may or may not belong to Midorima.

They meet in Kagami’s apartment.

“Why are you all in my house?” the teen says, eyebrows twitching at the sight of them, and then he hisses when Kuroko jabs his side.

“Kagami-kun is not being a very good host,” Kuroko says blankly.

“Kuroko, you little sh—!”

“Sa-chin,” says Murasakibara, sleep still clinging to the edges of his eyes, “What’d you want to talk to us about? Is everything okay?”

Settling by the armchair, Kise lets out a choked gasp, and Momoi knows that he’s read Aomine’s thoughts. Akashi’s eyes narrow at the action.

“Are you in danger, Momoi?” he questions, and there’s a flash of gold in his eyes.

“No,” Momoi says, and then sits down on the couch. “No, I’m…this is something I’ve been keeping from you all, for, well, _a while_ , you know? And I figured now’s a good time to come clean with it.” Then, after seeing their blank faces, adds, “It’s about my family.”

After a minute of listening to Kagami bustle around his kitchen, Midorima fixes his glasses in that awkward way of his that he does to mask his concern. “Well?”

“I was born in the Academy,” Momoi tells them after she draws a breath, quiet and somber in the face of their shock at the news. “In another Unit…before, before I was assigned to Unit Miracle in the sixth grade.” She tries to swallow around the lump in her throat, but the words bubble out of her lips at a rate she can’t control. “I – I have a twin. A little brother, who was in the Unit with me, and…” ah, there are the tears. “And, well, um….”

“It’s okay, Momoicchi,” Kise says softly, an arm curling around her shoulders. “We understand.”

He tucks her against his side, and Momoi breathes a shuddered breath.

When she gets back to the safety of her bedroom, she wraps herself in her blankets and cries for two hours. It feels like somethings clawed her lungs out of her chest, leaving her raw and open and bloody, once she’s calmed herself down. A knock on her door pulls her out of her muddle thoughts.

“Hey, sweetie,” says Maiko as she edges into the room, eyes drinking her in. “Are you – do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” Momoi croaks out. “No, I don’t.”

Maiko nods, and, unlike what Momoi thinks, she curls herself around Momoi and cards her fingers through her hair. “Okay, you don’t have to tell me,” Maiko says against the crown of her head, “but I’m here for you, alright? We’re all here for you, when you need us.”

(in the back of her mind, Momoi thinks: _is this what a mother is supposed to be like?_

She isn’t sure if she wants to know the answer).

After a moment of silence, Momoi licks her lips. “I just found out some upsetting news.”

“Oh? Like what, if you don’t mind sharing?”

In the distance, she hears a creak on the floorboards. Aomine is listening, but Momoi can’t bring herself to care. She feels numb. Hollow. She feels like she spent the last hour in the White Room.

“My brother is alive,” Momoi breathes out.

It feels disconcerting, to say it aloud.

Maiko tenses. “I – I didn’t know you – that’s wondering, Sacchan.”

“I don’t know how I feel,” Momoi tells her. She really doesn’t, having spent most of her life mourning her twin. _God,_ her little brother was alive, and she was none the wiser until now. What the fuck. What _the fuck._ “I don’t…I don’t know what to do next.”

Maiko smooths her hair. “Do you have any contact info.? You can start there, with a simple message, if you’re ready.”

“I don’t think I am,” Momoi says.

“That’s okay,” Maiko responds promptly. “No one is going to force you to do anything you don’t want to, okay?”

Momoi kind of wishes someone will.

“Okay,” she says instead. Her fingers curl around the paper in her hands tighter.

 _Here,_ Furihata had pressed it into her hands amidst her shock. _He – I got this from him. It’s his phone number. You should – you should, um, text him or…or something, when, when you’re ready._

Momoi doesn’t know if she will ever be ready.

“Did you know,” Momoi whispers, and she knows Aomine is listening in his bedroom because that’s just what they do, when one of their own is injured and hurt and no one truly knows why, and Momoi readies herself to expose one of the darkest parts of her being once more, “that I was born in the Academy?”

The silence is sharp.

“No,” Maiko says after a poignant pause. “No, I did not know that, Sacchan.”

“Unit Gemini,” Momoi explains. “Two sets of twins, one set of triplets.” Maiko says nothing at that, and Momoi continues, unbidden, bitter, and grieving, when she adds, “It’s just me and – and Nacchan now,” she pauses and reconsiders that statement. “It _was_.”

Maiko still says nothing when Momoi starts crying again.

“Did you know,” Momoi croaks out, “that my parents worked at the Academy?”

“No,” Maiko says.

Momoi starts laughing, but even her laughter fades into exhausted sobs.

_*_

_Did you know,_ she wants to say, _that I killed them?_

*

Three weeks after Furihata’s and Himuro’s trip to Iwatobi, Momoi gets a text. _Hi Momoi-san! Can we meet up and talk?_ And then, before Momoi can think of a response, Furihata sends the address of a cute coffee shop Momoi has been dying to go to.

When she gets there, a good ten minutes later, Furihata waits with a smile. “I’m sorry if I interrupted anything,” he first says, but Momoi shakes her head.

“I wasn’t busy,” she tells him. “Actually, I’ve been dying to go to this café, Kou-chan!”

Furihata hums. “I didn’t know if you wanted anything, so feel free to order before we, um, talk.”

“Okay,” says Momoi, in a cheerful tone, and she makes her way to the counter. Five minutes later, and she settles back in front of Furihata with a very delicious tea in a cute mug. “So. What’s going on?”

Furihata’s shoulders droop, and he looks so, so tired. There are dark moons underneath is eyes, and Momoi itches to text Akashi about the state his boyfriend is in. Momoi takes a sip of her tea and sighs. The last time Furihata pulled her aside with that particular look, well…it wasn’t pretty.

“I’m going to hate this, aren’t I?”

“What do you know,” Furihata begins, and starts pulling out slips of paper. They look hastily folded and crumbled, as if Furihata had jammed them into his pockets in a hurry. “About Project: Somnus?”

*

Momoi hates it.

**Author's Note:**

> This installment is divided into seven parts, a part for each member of Unit Miracle. It provides backstory and information on what each member was up to during Book 1: My Blood is Poison (My Veins are Death) and during Book 2: Ichor In My Blood (I Am Made of Galaxies). There will be some information I won’t include either due to spoilers or because it was explored in the aforementioned books. Thank you for supporting me throughout this series, and I hope you enjoy!
> 
> I would also like to thank five_lanterns for being an amazing and wonderful Beta! I did my best to make the scenes as smooth as possible, but I’m still struggling a little with writers’ block lol
> 
> A lot has happened in my life since I completed the last book (it’s a long, long story), but please talk to me about this AU at my new tumblr @dreamvevo!


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